Hacker News Reader

Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

I occasionally wake up from extreme leg cramps. It literally feels like someone is taking a knife on the serrated edge and pulling it down from the top of your calf muscle for a solid 20 seconds. All you can do is writhe in agony and scrounge up into a ball because naturally that is your response. After it's over you're in a ton of fatigue, your heart is racing, and just want to rest. Now do that in a pool.

View on HN

I get those in bed from time to time and my course of action is to keep the leg strait during the onset, get out of bed and stand up stretching the leg muscle. The pain can be very intense but once I stand up and apply pressure by standing on the leg, it almost immediately stops the cramp and the pain subsides within a few seconds.

I used to let the leg contract and curl up powering through the cramp pain until it subsided but a few times it lasted over a minute which is agonizing.

Sometimes I get leg cramps in bed and I've found that I have to pull my toes upward to make it recover. Doing that seems to release whatever is cramping up for me after a few seconds.

I used to have to get out of bed and stand on it before I discovered the other trick.

Same here, have also tried that in the water, but didn't work that time. I get the feeling that some of the cramps people talk about here are worse though, or perhaps it's also about how much pain you can stand or how you react to such a situation in general.

Yeah, I don't think mine have ever felt like a serrated blade going through my leg, as another comment here mentioned, so probably not quite as bad. But it's definitely bad enough that I can't use the leg properly and it seems to manifest when I move my leg just wrong somehow, even in bed.

The trick to pull the tip of my foot backwards really helped a lot because then I don't have to try to stand or anything.

I've never had a cramp like that in water, thankfully.

As a young adult, I had the same problem once or twice per week. There are many potential causes, but I was lucky to find the cause of mine on the first try (after suffering with them for a few years). Now I take a daily potassium supplement. (One 550mg tablet of potassium gluconate daily.) I haven't had a leg cramp for decades.

Aye! That's it usually- electrolytes.

Lack of hydration has also caused me light cramps. E.g: I was too excited about learning to surf to want go out of the water one summer. Plain water did the trick for me there.

You could try using a salt substitute like nusalt or lite salt. They contain potassium chloride. Cheap easy way to remember to get potassium, just eat.

Ok, I understand.. it seems I had milder versions of cramps. The one I remember the most was when I basically had to grab the toes of my foot and pull hard counter to the cramping muscle and basically it ceased after several seconds. It was very painful but I didn't know they can be paralyzing.

This kind of extreme cramp is known as a "charley horse", if you want more information.

Used to get that a lot. Leg once cramped super hard which smashed my knee into a metal railing. Double agony that night.

  Magnesium supplements really helped a lot. Later on, stretching lots and lots of stretching.  Now a massage gun.  Cramps are a thing of the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com